An Integrative Review of Moderators Attenuating or Exacerbating Negative Outcomes of Job Insecurity

Job insecurity is a lasting and pervasive issue in the modern workplace. Given the extensive body of research highlighting the detrimental effects of job insecurity, it is imperative to explore factors that may either buffer against or amplify these negative outcomes. This review identifies and discusses five primary theoretical perspectives commonly used in existing research to explain the moderating effects of job insecurity: resource-threatening, appraisal, social-exchange, identity-threatening, and uncertainty reduction. Additionally, I categorize a wide array of moderators across three levels—individual, organizational, and societal—each with three subcategories. I summarize research findings within each category based on the theoretical perspectives, explore competing predictions from different perspectives, and highlight how quantitative job insecurity and qualitative job insecurity may activate the same or different moderators with varying effects. The review concludes with a comprehensive summary of overall findings, addressing the issues of research saturation and redundancy, the lack of replication studies, the jangle fallacy, and research gaps and future research directions.